Authentic homage to the early days of animated cartoons … Cuphead.
Photograph: Studio MDHR

You may have heard that this game is hard. We can report, its difficulty has not been overstated – but punishment isn’t everything it has to offer. While Cuphead is decidedly painful, committed to beating you over the head with death after death in its 1930s-style animated world, it’s also meticulously crafted. It’s rich in tone, near pitch perfect in its balancing and it’s dedicated to teaching you the best way to succeed – all while you desperately sway between bashing your head against a wall and screaming in victorious elation.

Bosses are the central spectacle here – ultra-paced, wonderfully designed, concentrated encounters that punctuate its run-time – but the immediate appeal is its inimitable art style. As a homage to the early days of animated cartoons, Cuphead is about as authentic as you get. The film grain crackles and its watercolour backgrounds pop with an obsessive attention to detail that never lets up. Its characters, too, are a work of art, offering up some of the most visually distinct creatures you will see in video games. That unflinching authenticity seeps into every part of Cuphead, from its menus to its music; from its character names – shout out to Porkrind the shop keeper – to their voice work. It’s fantastic across the board.

Studio MDHR have created a rich cartoon world. Photograph: PR Company Handout

The bosses and levels are best left discovered on your own, of course, thanks to some excellent and inventive designs and unexpected transitions that surprise both visually and mechanically. Levels come in three forms – run’n’gun left-to-right platforming, bullet-hell style flight bosses and pure platforming fights. They’re some of the most distinct in recent memory. Telepathic carrot-firing vegetable creatures; frog boxers who transform into coin-shooting slot machines; or a giant bird in bizarre armour; developer Studio MDHR consistently breaks its own design moulds as it rolls out one unique boss after another, all of which offer up their own idiosyncrasies.

It’s up to you to properly learn the ropes – and by God will it take some learning – in order to get through unscathed. You have no way to regain health mid-fight and just three pips of life before you die. There are no mid-level checkpoints either. This is hardcore at its hardest.

The only way to really make headway is to utilise your combination of two main weapons, a super attack and a bonus power to figure out the best way to defeat a boss. You unlock new abilities fairly rapidly, allowing for further customisation and on-the-fly experimentation in the fights you’re having most trouble with. Some bosses will be better fought with short-range, high-damage attacks. In others you’ll want to keep your distance, depending on the kind of moves that particular boss is prone to doling out. As you go you’ll find the challenge increases but stays, aside from a few later-game exceptions, consistently fair.

With no health bar for enemies and no sense of visual feedback, though, there’s no way to no how far you are from victory in any given fight. This seems like a misstep that serves the beautiful art style but can, at times, feel needlessly obtuse from a gameplay perspective. There were times when we would die and realise we were on the brink of winning, thanks to a post-death progression meter that shows your relative progress towards victory, only to have to retry again. But it’s these close defeats that keeps you pushing forward for a win. Always waiting for the sweet sound of “Knockout!” to signify the boss is down.

In what must be some kind of internal joke, Cuphead’s bosses have two difficulty settings. The first is, almost tauntingly, called “Simple” while the other is called “Regular”. This essentially translates to “really damn hard” and “how the hell is this even harder”. On the former difficulty, you will encounter obstacles enough to halt the progress of even the most capable player – even a bouncing blue ball of a boss that simply boinks from side to side can, somehow, be challenging. On the latter, it can be phenomenally tough.

Playing on simple mode will only get you so far, too – the game locks off its finale until you’ve defeated everything in the preceding three worlds in regular mode. You also don’t get to see entire portions of boss fights if you play in Simple, meaning you miss out on some of Cuphead’s incredible design elements. That aforementioned coin-spitting slot machine simply gets cut out if you fight the frog boxers in simple mode. Worse yet, you miss the ratings cards, which beg you to replay fights in quicker times, or without losing your trio of lives.

Some players will likely malign this decision, criticising its developers for locking off content for the elite few capable of besting its bosses on regular mode. For us, it shows a laser focus that pushes you constantly to better your game. Cuphead is absolutely not for the faint of heart, then, but it’s certainly captivating. Come for the gorgeous bygone ragtime jazz, Porkrind’s shop and an evil carrot; stay for the thrill of defeating a boss you’ve spent hours attempting. It’s painful, but you won’t find many games with such a moreish, satisfying sting.